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Sunday, May 17, 2009

I’d guess that for a lot of the people who watched last night’s Will Ferrell-hosted season finale of Saturday Night Live, the highlight might have been the last sketch, which featured Ferrell singing Billy Joel’s “Goodnight Saigon” along with the entire SNL cast, Tom Hanks, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Green Day, Norm Macdonald, Paul Rudd, Anne Hathaway, Elizabeth Moss, and, for some reason, Artie Lange. Others might have liked the “Celebrity Jeopardy!” reunion or the return of the Mayrelle Sisters. For me, however, the best part was the funeral sketch — which itself was a retread of a wedding toast sketch from the Hugh Laurie episode earlier this season.

The big difference between the original and this one is the out-of-nowhere appearance of Glenda Goodwin — a rather obscure Maya Rudolph character whose handful of appearances have, to my knowledge, never been reproduced in online videos and only one of which appears at SNL Transcripts.

Toward the end of last night’s funeral sketch, Glenda appears — carrying her own microphone — and salutes the dead guy, amazingly, by singing about sasquatches to the tune of “Amazing Grace.”

For the record, those lyrics are as follows:

Amazing sasquatchYour powers are manyYou walk through the woodsAnd get photographedYou don’t need a coatBut you do need a combBecause your bodyIs basically a beard

And then in the second verse, she asks for directions to nachos.

I have no idea why Glenda Goodwin was given a chance to return, but I’m guessing it’s just a coincidence that the character’s first appearance referenced Land of the Lost, the remake of which Will Ferrell was plugging in his hosting gig. The first Glenda Goodwin sketch was a commercial for her legal services, in which she promised to defend clients in cases involving paranormal circumstances such as invisible robots, werewolves, Tyrannosaurus rexes, paintings with moving eyeballs, and the Sleestaks from the original Land of the Lost.

Glenda Goodwin wonderment aside, the wedding toast sketch was better, mostly because Kristen Wiig’s delivery of its final line — “There’s a body in bathroom!” — is unbeatable.